The Hidden Assassins

‘Take it,’ she said, her voice still stuck under her thyroid.

‘Thank you, thank you very much,’ he said, dropping her handbag to his feet. ‘But that’s not enough for what you want. Come back with the rest tomorrow.’

He pressed against her. She felt his obscene hardness against her buttocks. His face came over her shoulder once more and he kissed her on the corner of her mouth, his wine and tobacco breath and bitter little tongue slipping between her lips.

He pushed himself away, a gold ring on his finger flashed in the corner of her eye. He stepped back, kicked her handbag down the street.

‘Fuck off, whore,’ he said. ‘You make me sick.’

The steel tips receded. Consuelo’s throat still throbbed so that breathing was more like swallowing without being able to achieve either. She looked back to where he’d gone, confused at her escape. The empty cobbles shone under the yellow light. She pushed away from the wall, snatched up her handbag and ran, slipping and hobbling, down the street to the main road where she hailed a cab. She sat in the back with the city floating past her pallid face. Her hands shook too much to light the cigarette she’d managed to get into her mouth. The driver lit it for her.

At home she found money in her desk to pay for the taxi. She ran upstairs and checked the boys in their beds. She went to her own room and stripped off and looked at herself in the mirror. He hadn’t marked her. She showered endlessly, soaping and resoaping herself, rinsing herself again and again.

She went back to her desk in her dressing gown and sat in the dark, feeling nauseous, head aching, waiting for dawn. When it was the earliest possible acceptable moment, she phoned Alicia Aguado and asked for an emergency appointment.

3 (#ulink_049639ff-6bf7-5c62-83c8-ccbc540bc045)

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 02.00 hrs

Juez Esteban Calderón was not on business. The urbane and highly successful judge had told his wife, Inés, that he was working late before going to dinner with a group of young state judges who had come down from Madrid on a training course. He had worked late and he had gone to the dinner, but he’d excused himself early and was now taking his favourite little detour down the side of the San Marcos church to reach ‘the penthouse of promise’, which overlooked the church of Santa Isabel. He usually enjoyed smoking a cigarette at the edge of the small, floodlit plaza, looking from within the darkness at the fountain and the massive portal of the church. It calmed him after long days spent with prosecutors and policemen and kept him out of the way of some bars around the corner, which were frequented by colleagues. If they saw him there it would get back to Inés and there’d be awkward questions. He also needed a few moments to rein in his quivering sexual tension, which started every morning when he woke up and imagined the long coppery hair and mulatto skin of his Cuban girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, who lived in the penthouse just visible from where he was sitting.

His cigarette hissed in a puddle where he’d tossed it, half smoked. He took off his jacket. A breeze sprayed droplets of water from the orange trees on to his back, and he caught his breath at the lash of its sudden chill. He kept to the wall of the church until he was in the darkness of the narrow street. His finger hovered over the top button of the entry phone as an accumulation of half thoughts made him hesitate: subterfuge, infidelity, fear, sex, dizziness and death. He scratched at the air above the button; these unusual thoughts made him feel that he was on the brink of something like a great change. What to do? Either step over the edge or fall back. He swallowed some thick, bitter saliva from his fast smoking. The sensuality of the lash of raindrops across his back reached that nexus of nerves in the base of his spine. The unease disappeared. His recklessness made him feel alive again and his cock leapt in his pants. He hit the buzzer.

‘It’s me,’ he said, to the crackle of Marisa’s voice.

‘You sound thirsty.’

‘Not thirsty,’ he said, clearing his throat.

The two-man lift didn’t seem to have enough air and he started panting. Its stainless steel panels reflected the absurd shape of his arousal and he rearranged himself. He brushed back his thinning hair, loosened his flamboyant tie and knocked on her door. It opened a crack and Marisa’s amber eyes blinked slowly. The door fell open. She was wearing a long, orange silk shift, which nearly reached the floor. It was fastened with a single amber disc between her flat breasts. She kissed him and slipped a cube of ice from between her lips into his confused mouth and something like a firework went off in the back of his head.

She held him at bay with a single finger on his sternum. The ice cooled his tongue. She gave him an appraising look, from crown to crotch, and admonished him with a raised eyebrow. She took his jacket and hurled it into the room. He loved this whorish stuff she did, and she knew it. She dropped to her haunches, undid his belt and tugged his trousers and underpants down, then eased him profoundly into the coolness of her mouth. Calderón braced himself in the doorframe and gritted his teeth. She looked up at his agony with wide eyes. He lasted less than a minute.

She stood, turned on her heel and strode back into her apartment. Calderón pulled himself together. He didn’t hear her hawking and spitting in the bathroom. He just saw her reappear from the kitchen, carrying two chilled glasses of cava.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said, looking at the thin, gold wafer of watch on her wrist, ‘and then I remembered my mother telling me that the only time a Sevillano wasn’t late was for the bulls.’

Calderón was too dazed to comment. Marisa drank from her flute. Twenty gold and silver bracelets rattled on her forearm. She lit a cigarette, crossed her legs and let the shift slip away to reveal a long, slim leg, orange panties and a hard brown stomach. Calderón knew that stomach, its paper-thin skin, hard wriggling muscularity and soft coppery down. He’d laid his head on it and stroked the tight copper curls of her pubis.

‘Esteban!’

He snapped out of the natural revolutions of his mind.

‘Have you eaten?’ he asked, nothing else coming to him, conversation not being one of the strengths of their relationship.

‘I don’t need any feeding,’ she said, taking a shelled brazil nut from a bowl, and putting it between her hard, white teeth. ‘I’m quite ready to be fucked.’

The nut went off in her mouth like a silenced gun and Calderón reacted like a sprinter out of the blocks. He fell into her snake-like arms and bit into her unnaturally long neck, which seemed stretched, like those of African tribal women. In fact for him, that was her attraction: part sophisticate, part savage. She’d lived in Paris, modelling for Givenchy, and travelled across the Sahara with a caravan of Tuaregs. She’d slept with a famous movie director in Los Angeles and lived with a fisherman on the beach near Maputo in Mozambique. She’d worked for an artist in New York, and spent six months in the Congo learning how to carve wood. Calderón knew all this, and believed it because Marisa was such an extraordinary creature, but he didn’t have the first idea of what was going on in her head. So, like a good lawyer, he clung to these few dazzling facts.

After sex they went to bed, which for Marisa was a place to talk or sleep but not for the writhings and juices of sex. They lay naked under a sheet with light from the street in parallelograms on the wall and ceiling. The cava fizzed in glasses balanced on their chests. They shared an ashtray in the trough between their bodies.

‘Shouldn’t you have gone by now?’ said Marisa.

‘Just a little bit longer,’ said Calderón, drowsy.

‘What does Inés think you’re doing all this time?’ asked Marisa, for something to say.

‘I’m at a dinner…for work.’

‘You’re just about the last person in the world who should be married,’ she said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, maybe not. After all, you Sevillanos are very conservative. Is that why you married her?’

‘Part of it.’

‘What was the other part?’ she asked, pointing the cone of her cigarette at his chest. ‘The more interesting part.’

She burnt a hair off one of his nipples; the smell of it filled his nostrils.

‘Careful,’ he said, feeling the sting, ‘you don’t want ash all over the sheets.’

She rolled back from him, flicked her cigarette out on to the balcony.

‘I like to hear the parts that people don’t want to tell me about,’ she said.

Her coppery hair was splayed out on the white pillow. He hadn’t been able to look at her hair without thinking of the other woman he’d known with hair of the same colour. It had never occurred to him to tell anybody about the late Maddy Krugman except the police in his statement. He hadn’t even talked to Inés about that night. She knew the story from the newspapers, the surface of it anyway, and that was all she’d wanted to know.

Marisa raised her head and sipped from her flute. He was attracted to her for the same reason that he’d been attracted to Maddy: the beauty, the glamour, the sexiness and the complete mystery. But what was he to her? What had he been to Maddy Krugman? That was something that occupied his spare thinking time. Especially those hours of the early morning, when he woke up next to Inés and thought that he might be dead.

‘I don’t really give a fuck why you married her,’ said Marisa, trying a well-tested trick.

‘Well, that’s not what’s interesting.’

‘I’m not sure I need to know what is interesting,’ said Marisa. ‘Most men who think they’re fascinating only ever talk about themselves…their successes.’

‘This wasn’t one of my successes,’ said Calderón. ‘It was one of my greatest failures.’

He’d made a snap decision to tell her. Candour was not one of his strongest suits; in his society it had a way of coming back on you, but Marisa was an outsider. He also wanted to fascinate her. Having always been the object of fascination to women he’d understood completely, he had the uncomfortable feeling of being ordinary with exotic creatures like Maddy Krugman and Marisa Moreno. Here, he thought, was an opportunity to intrigue the intriguers.

‘It was about four years ago and I’d just announced my engagement to Inés,’ he said. ‘I was called to a situation, which looked like a murder-suicide. There were some anomalies, which meant that the detective, who, by a coincidence, happened to be the ex-husband of Inés, wanted to treat it as a double murder investigation. The victim’s neighbours were American. The woman was an artist and stunningly beautiful. She was a photographer with a taste for the weird. Her name was Maddy Krugman and I fell in love with her. We had a brief but intense affair until her insane husband found out and cornered us in an apartment one night. To cut a long and painful story short, he shot her and then himself. I was lucky not to get a bullet in the head as well.’

They lay in silence. Voices came up over the balcony rail from the street. A warm breeze blew at the voile curtains, which billowed into the room, bringing the smell of rain and the promise of hot weather in the morning.

‘And that’s why you married Inés.’

‘Maddy was dead. I was very badly shaken. Inés represented stability.’